This Sunday, Kim Jong Un rejected reconciliation or reunification with South Korea, seeing it as a mistake, and also called for the country’s “acceleration of war preparations,” including its nuclear weapons program, North Korea’s state news agency said. . It was also announced that Pyongyang plans to launch three spy satellites in 2024.
“I think it’s a mistake we shouldn’t make. People who call us our worst enemy see us as someone with whom we should seek reconciliation and unification,” Kim Jong Un said at the year-end plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee. North Korean workers.
At the same meeting, it was announced that North Korea should launch three new spy satellites in 2024 to strengthen its military capabilities. “The mission to launch three additional reconnaissance satellites in 2024 has been declared,” KCNA reported.
After two successive failures in May and June, North Korea successfully launched its first military observation satellite into orbit in November, with Pyongyang claiming to have provided images of key military sites in the United States and South Korea, but these has not disclosed.
We should not forget that successive rounds of United Nations resolutions have prevented North Korea from conducting tests on ballistic technology. However, South Korean intelligence services believe that Pyongyang has received decisive technological assistance from Russia, a country Kim Jong Un visited in September, which included a meeting between the North Korean leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the start of the party meeting, the North Korean leader had already called for the “acceleration of war preparations,” including its nuclear weapons program, in light of “confrontational maneuvers” by the United States and its allies.
Still speaking at last Sunday’s meeting, Kim Jong Un said the Korean Peninsula was in the grip of “an ongoing and uncontrollable crisis situation” blamed on the United States and South Korea. In this sense, the ruler therefore ordered: a reorganization of the administrations managing relations with the South, in order to “fundamentally change the direction”.
In 2018, the two Koreas began a process of rapprochement, marked by three meetings between Kim Jong-un and then South Korean President Moon Jae-in, but this rapprochement has since been abandoned.
This new threat from Pyongyang to use nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies comes about a week after the International Atomic Energy Agency said a new nuclear reactor in North Korea “appears to have been commissioned.”
The Yongbyon complex, about 100 kilometers north of Pyongyang, has already installed the country’s first nuclear reactor. Since mid-October, a “strong flow of water” has been observed coming from a reactor’s cooling system, IAEA Director Rafael Grossi said.
However, the verification process takes time and without access to the facility, the IAEA cannot accurately confirm its operational status. Seoul said Friday it expects North Korea’s experimental light water reactor to be operational by summer.
Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. The sixth and most recent trial, in 2017, was also the most powerful. 2023 marked a record number of missile launch tests by North Korea, the last of which was in December – the most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile in the country’s arsenal, the Hwasong-18, which could reach the United States, was tested.
Due to this growing number of tests, on the 19th South Korea, the United States and Japan announced the launch of a system for sharing real-time information on North Korean missiles and a plan for regular exercises to counter Pyongyang’s military advance to go. countries reiterate that they will continue to strengthen cooperation “to respond to regional challenges” and ensure security in the Indo-Pacific region.
Washington already exchanged information separately with its allies in the Asian region, but until now there was no direct data link between the three countries, due to disputes between Tokyo and Seoul over the Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945.
with agencies
Source: DN
